Introduction Working on a recent Pi project, I needed to use some servo's. This blog post discusses a servo controller project that can be used for toy and model cars, planes, model robots and so on. There are existing controllers out there, but I didn’t have one, and besides some of them seemed expensive – I didn’t want to spend $15+ on something I could make for $2. Also this was an opportunity to try to design something hopefully better (in some ways) than existing off-the-s ...

Introduction This blog post is about powering a new security camera (HAL-CAM 9001) using network cables. These could be cables already installed in an office or home environment, saving costs, or they could be new cables installed indoors or outdoors (using weather resistant cable). This sub-project is part of the HAL-CAM 9001 project but it is generic enough to suit other scenarios too. It could be used to power a Raspberry Pi remotely for other tasks. Other single board computers (SBCs ...

A Linux Based Image Detecting Security Camera Traditional security camera solutions are very good at detecting movement however these solutions are unaware about what that movement actually is. They cannot automatically tell the difference between trees moving in the air, or a car or a human. We wanted to have a system that could identify humans and record such information; this would allow it to discriminate between uninteresting activity (such as a car driving past a road) and more interestin ...

Note: This is part 1 of a 2-part post. For part 2, click here: Raspberry Pi 3 Dynamic Current Consumption, Power and Temperature Tests To see an implementation using a heat pipe, see the Outdoor Pi 3 Image Recognition Security Camera project (aka HAL-CAM 9001) Inspired by Christopher's cstanton Raspberry Pi Operating Temperature report (with thermal photos from Gareth Halfacree) regarding the heat dissipated by the Broadcom chip on the Raspberry Pi 3, and the discussion with bwelsby w ...

Note: This is part 1 of a 2-part series on an experimental user interface Part 1: - You are here! <--- Part 2: - Not yet written! Bookmark to be notified here when it is available Note: The technique described here is experimental and should be restricted to the sole purpose of UI implementation, and the browser files should be local. Security considerations beyond the scope of this blog post would need to be taken into account if the pages accessed by this technique were remote and ...

Introduction There is plenty of jitter on signals generated using GPIO on the Raspberry Pi and many other computers, and this is due to the fact that Linux can context-switch user processes at any desired point in time dependant on its scheduler (for more information on this, see the Raspberry Pi GPIO Explained guide). One solution is to use custom driver code, but this is a non-trivial exercise. Another typical workaround is to offload time-sensitive I/O to external hardware suc ...

Robots with Wheels Enter Your Electronics & Design Project for Your Chance to Win a $100 Shopping Cart! Back to The Project14 homepage Project14 Home Monthly Themes Monthly Theme Poll Note: XMP-2 also has a virtual simulation, check it out by clicking here. Introduction The ground-breaking XMOS startKIT is an ultra-low cost near-credit-card sized board designed for real time operations. It was launched about a year ago at a very low cost (£12 including VAT) as a proce ...

A Question of Scale Enter Your Electronics & Design Project for a Chance to Win a Cartridge-Sized NES Portable or a $100 Shopping Cart! Back to The Project14 homepage Project14 Home Monthly Themes Monthly Theme Poll Introduction Every lab (home, office, school) needs temperature measurement capabilities. Measuring temperature for science experiments is hard – all sorts of materials, liquids, and chemicals may be involved or a large temperature range may need to be covered. T ...

Introduction This project provides “oscilloscope-like” capabilities for the ultra low cost of £12, with near-zero soldering required. It’s not a very practical oscilloscope (and this project is really just a quick proof-of-concept written in a couple of evenings) but the information here may be reusable for analog sensing applications and for any other projects that require plotting data to a screen. It could possibly be useful as-is to demonstrate low frequency waveforms ...

(Note: Click here to see XMP-2!) Introduction The XMOS startKIT from Farnell (or Newark) is a very low cost (£12 including VAT) processor platform that works well with the Raspberry Pi. Together is possible to construct robotics applications with almost no soldering required. The XMOS startKIT is a near-credit-card sized board with an XMOS chip on it with multiple ‘XMOS cores’ that can be programmed in C. XMOS technology allows things to run in parallel at ...

Introduction The Sleepy Pi is a board produced not a million miles from my home town, and it is designed to extend the Raspberry Pi (RPI) capabilities. After having examined it, the conclusion is that the board is fantastic with a rich set of functionality and extremely well-designed, and it will provide tremendous value for projects with the types of requirements listed below. This board should interest people with any of these requirements: 1. The ability to run the RPI f ...

Introduction This was a fun project to try to make some flashing lights. Of course, it needed to be a bit more complex than that so a Raspberry Pi was used for Internet connectivity, and some analog circuitry was used to generate multiple PWM outputs to drive strings of lamps. Everything can be dimmed or particular patterns selected from any web browser. For a holiday look, the lamps were enclosed in star-shaped laser-cut acrylic. All the steps are detailed here if you wish to build something s ...